Tag: Socialism

“The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution,” wrote The New York Times on Friday as Pope Francis’ Latin American tour, featuring “left-leaning critiques” of “the inequalities of capitalism” and of “a ‘new colonialism’ rooted in an inequitable economic order,” approached its end.

The economist and philosopher foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction, that the greed of a tiny elite would eventually bring down the system. The final stages that he predicted are visible all around us now.

In a triumphant win, the anti-poverty activist, who rose to fame fighting for Spaniards being evicted from their homes, was elected to head the Catalan city of Barcelona on Sunday. Meanwhile, in Madrid, the 20-year conservative grip on power could be coming to an end.

It’s hard to fathom why Western media seem to buy into the U.S. government’s demonization of Venezuela’s democratically elected socialist government and yet essentially give a pass to countries (Mexico, anyone?) with clearly corrupt and discredited leadership.

“Some of the proposals Obama made tonight point in the right direction, on taxing the rich, on providing a free community college education, paid sick and maternity leave, and municipal broadband,” Sawant began.

The American president has signed legislation that freezes assets and revokes travel visas belonging to Venezuelan officials who stand accused of violating the human rights of opponents of the South American nation’s socialist government.

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges embarks on a long, ranging discussion with political philosopher and former professor of politics at Princeton University Sheldon Wolin on the state of American democracy and the rise of corporate capitalism.

A new study from Harvard Business School suggests that people all across the world, from very divergent backgrounds and ideologies, want the income gap to become smaller—and also that it’s actually bigger than they realized.

Amid a renewed call for reparations to be paid to the descendants of America’s black slaves, Bruce A. Dixon at the Black Agenda Report notes a crucial gap between the diagnoses and prescriptions made by socially concerned journalists.

The writer of the best-selling book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” that’s on everybody’s mind these days stopped by “The Colbert Report” on Monday for a reckoning with the faux-conservative host.

Armed shock troops in key cities of Ukraine may yet provoke a civil war. Ukraine is now a disputed territory between two oligarchic regimes, one based in Ukraine and the other in the Russian Federation. But there is also a collision of imperial spheres of interest in this region.

In an address to the U.S. Senate this week, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders testified to the basics of wealth inequality and described how it distorts the U.S. political process. His speech contains vital statistics for your reference.

Growing up in a well-heeled suburban community, I absorbed our society’s distaste for dissent long before I was old enough to grasp just what was being dismissed, which is why I traveled thousands of miles to a Zapatista “organizing school” in the heart of the Lacandon jungle in southeastern Mexico to try to sort out just what I’d been missing.

Comedian-actor-writer Russell Brand took on a range of topics including spirituality, materialism, politics and revolution during an interview at Cambridge University’s student union in England last week.

Seattle’s first socialist city official in decades, an economics teacher, former Occupy Wall Street activist and former Truthdigger of the Week, ran on a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She enters office Monday along with Mayor Ed Murray.

“Chavismo,” the left-wing movement that blossomed around deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez over the past decade, “comfortably” won municipal elections throughout the country this month, “consolidating President Maduro’s leadership, and further enhancing Venezuelan democracy,” writes a leader of the populist Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.

In the same election in which a socialist won a seat on the Seattle City Council, voters in the nearby city of SeaTac also approved a $15 hourly minimum wage for some workers in and around Seattle-Tacoma airport. Even if a recount reverses the result, the election seems to place the Seattle area at the vanguard of a surge of progressive political success.

By winning a seat on Seattle’s City Council this month, the socialist has given her fellow citizens one of the best opportunities in living memory to determine their individual and collective futures. Will city residents make good on it?

Some self-serving websites charge people who have been arrested to take their photos off the Internet; socialists should be outraged about Obamacare; meanwhile, is Obama headed toward isolationism or exceptionalism? These discoveries and more after the jump.

Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s former right hand man and current president of Venezuela, called on his administration Thursday to offer more help on constructing socialist settlements in the country. The president, addressing the nation on his TV show, “Bolivarian Dialogue,” emphasized that the communes are a priority and require support in order to expand.

After a series of interviews discussing such issues as corporate control of America and the grim realities facing the economy and environment, the Real News Network’s Paul Jay asks the Truthdig columnist what he thinks is “the key link for what’s next.”

Unlike the Danes, American society has abstracted freedom from its prerequisite of economic security. Vermonters learned of enviable Danish freedom in a series of town meetings this month with one of their senators, Bernie Sanders, and Peter Taksoe-Jensen, the Danish ambassador to the U.S.

Reading mass media news articles is unhealthy and causes unhappiness, so stop it; Americans want to know more about socialism, as evidenced by Merriam-Webster’s two most searched entries in 2012; meanwhile the Swedes were dissatisfied with gendered pronouns and have officially incorporated a third, gender-neutral one into their language. These discoveries and more after the jump.

The foreign policy of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez imagined that socialism and anti-imperialism are the same thing, and that he could lead a new sort of socialist international. These considerations shaped his Middle East policy in ways that were contradictory and hypocritical.

Raul Castro announced Sunday that his new presidential term would be his last as the “founding generation” of Cuba’s 1959 revolution gives “new generations the responsibility to continue building socialism.”

Although Karl Marx discerned in the middle of the 19th century that a new class of capitalists was creating “a world after its own image,” it took until the beginning of the 21st century before “a constantly expanding market” could be said to have fully spread capitalist social relations “over the entire surface of the globe,” write Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin in their new book, “The Making of Global Capitalism.”

“For many in my generation, the ideological underpinnings of capitalism have been undermined,” writes Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara at The Guardian. “That a higher percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 have a more favorable opinion of socialism than capitalism … signals that the cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway.”

While Mitt Romney tries to make us believe socialism is evil, working mothers in France are evidence to the contrary; several stories about employers insisting their employees vote for Romney have come to light; meanwhile, activists in Guatemala are peacefully protesting mining in San José del Golfo in spite of violence against them. These discoveries and more.